Today we are pleased to announce the release of Metro Elements – a suite of powerful controls to help you make compelling Windows Store apps in less time. Thank you to everyone who played around with the beta and gave us lots of feedback to improve this product. Download the free trial now!

Sample Explorer

After installing Metro Elements, a shortcut to the Samples solution will be added to the desktop, and a shortcut to the install directory will be pinned to the start menu for easy access. In the Samples solution you can run the Sample Explorer project to browse through all the controls and see them in action. This sample shows off several options and customizations you can make to each control and also displays the code used for each sample. The Sample Explorer is built with a simplistic design and is easy to navigate to the control you want to view.

On each demo page you can swipe left or right or use the “Related Demos” list in the bottom right corner to see more samples.

Either right click the screen or swipe up from the bottom of the screen to bring up the app bar. On the left side are some navigation commands, and on the right side are some button to view the XAML code, C# code or switch back to the demo.

Controls

Metro Elements gives you 30 controls which includes a comprehensive charting suite. below is a quick preview of some of the top controls:

The chart controls can render data in over 15 different ways including line chart, area chart, pie chart, stock charts and stacked charts. There are many powerful features to define the axes, background/foreground elements and visual customizations. The Sample Explorer demonstrates a lot of capabilities that the charting will bring to your applications.

The CoverFlow naturally fits well into Windows Store apps with its smooth animation and touch support. This control displays a collection of items for the user to pick from. You can define whatever path you want the items to flow along, and specify functions to customize the opacity, scale, size and rotation of each item.

The book control displays pages of information that the user can flip through using touch or mouse gestures.

The CalendarControl can both display custom data for each day or month as well as serving as a date selector. Tapping the header causes the control to animate out to year view which allows for quick navigation. Here the control is being used as a simple weather tracker:

Other controls include various radial guages, an animating content control, auto complete box, prompt decorator, tile grid, numeric text boxes and more. Documentation to aid you in using these controls can be found in the Documentation folder in the install directory.

You can download the free trial from here to start playing around with the controls. The trial has no time limit, so you can evaluate the product for as long as you need.